Total Pageviews

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

PPCT. Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune. Why is this so hard to understand. If politicians are being supported financially by rich individuals, banks, the Corporatocracy, by the arms manufacturers, these individuals and companies will call the tune. The politicians will do their bidding. Right wing governments seem to be particularly prone to this, having a built in sympathy for big business but left wing parties are also supported by big business. Why should we be surprised when, even the left rarely does what is good for the people who elected them.

Look around you. Is the middle class participating in the economy or is more and more money being accumulated by the top 1%. Are the rights of workers being eroded, even down to the petty level that companies no longer have to give their workers a tea break*. Are companies being allowed to avoid taxes by various dodges such as joining with a small company in a foreign country with a different tax system. Are companies sending their manufacturing overseas. If you see these symptoms, you are in a country in which the government is in Thrall to big business.

* Recent move by the government here in New Zealand

Here is a particularly insidious example. In the US of A, the land of democracy and freedom, the land in which the government is for the people and by the people, (yeah right!!) a vast majority of those same citizens agree that many gun reforms are necessary. Agreement is pretty universal that one shouldn't be able to buy assault rifles, not buy guns with huge manazines, not buy heavy machine guns, for heaven sake and so forth. It is agreed that there should be background checks and, for instance, insane people and criminals should not be able to buy guns. And yet the American Government ignores the people. Who do you think is paying the piper in this example. Follow the money. Even more strange, a significant proportion of the NRA (National Rifle Association) agrees with the need for many of the suggested reforms. Guess who is making money from a lack of gun control. Always follow the money.

The only way out of this is to give politicians a set amount of money from the public purse and a set amount of air time on Government radio stations. They should be afforded free time in halls and civic centres to address people and of course they can use the internet to their hearts content.

It would be worthwhile to provide each politician with a standard web site with the information arranged in a standard form so that any citizen, once he had got used to the format, could easily search for whatever information he is looking for.

These standard web sites could also be linked horizontally where, for instance, if you were looking up the voting record of a particular politician on a specific bill, you could jump sideways to another politician to see how he had voted on the same bill.

Part of the information would be entered for them such as their voting record, their history, any convictions they have had and so forth and the rest of the web site would be for them to present their case.They would be allowed to apply for a correction to any of these permanent records but not to alter them themselves in any way.

Does this sound expensive; giving politicians money for their campaigns from the public purse. If you think so, just look at the cost of the present system. Money is being concentrated in the hands of the now famous 1%, The rich are paying far less than their fair share of taxes, corporations are avoiding taxes and they send their manufacturing overseas and join with small overseas companies to avoid taxes. Even Warren Buffet says that he pays a smaller tax, by percentage, than his secretary. Big business is taking their profits overseas and are still allowed to operate as if they are American businesses and the middle class is being gutted. The cost of the present system is huge and effects all of us.

Worse still, there is a very good chance that the present system will destroy our civilization due to sudden climate change as we push the light switch just that little bit too far. It may send us back into a dark age or even a stone age. Fossil fuel is being burnt in greater and greater amounts each year and governments are not taking the simple, well known, technical measures that would address this*. All of this, despite report after report by the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) that we are heading for hell in a hand basket.

*With the exception, surprisingly, of China. Yes she is building more coal fired power stations and her output of Carbon dioxide is increasing but at an ever reducing rate. China is going flat out to change over to renewable energy and is likely to be the star in this endeavour amongst the countries of the world.

A good start would be to simply transfer the estimated trillion dollars of subsidies from the fossil fuel industry which is hugely profitable and give it to renewable energy companies.

The next step might be to institute Tax and Dividend a la Jim Hansen. Neither of these measures and a host of other simple, well understood, necessary measures will be taken as long as politicians are financed by vested interests.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Globalization has been a disaster for the people of the world and Free Trade Agreements are their cornerstone. It shouldn't be this way. Free trade between people should bring benefits to all. The problem is the lack of regulation. On an individual level we are regulated. We aren't allowed to kill each other and there are sanctions if we do. We aren't allowed to steal from each other, to shut down the right of other to free speech, to freedom of religion and so forth.

Big business has been fighting tooth and nail to be allowed to operate without regulation. We will self regulate, they say. Well we have seen where that got us in 2008. If it hadn't been for Obama, we would have had a financial melt down. As it is, the best that could be done is to postpone the melt down while we got banks, wall street and big business under control. We have failed.

Because these institutions Pay the Piper, they Call the Tune (PPCT) and the underlying situation is even more dire than it was before 2008. Banks are bigger, we haven't put in place regulations to allow them to fail, they are gambling with our money and Rent taking* and we allow big business to pollute our commons even to our air without paying for the clean up.

*Every time they make a transaction, some of the money sticks to their grubby little fingers as a commission. This is called rent taking. It encourages them to shift money back and forth and enriches them beyond the dreams of ordinary people. Where do you think this money comes from. That's right. From your pocket.

For heaven sake, the fossil fuel industry receives an estimated trillion dollars of subsidies and makes gigantic profits when they should actually be paying extra tax for the mess they are making. Sure it is us that are using their products but they are fighting tooth and nail to avoid a transition to renewable energy. They are probably loosing the battle but their rear guard actions are making the transition take far too long. We may be well on the way to testing the theory of sudden climate change.

Below is an small sample of Naomi Klein's recent book
This Changes Everything. I would highly recommend getting the whole
book. In this part, Naomi describes how trade agreements shot down what
has been described as the best solar energy initiative in North
America. Be afraid, be very much afraid. This is only one aspect of the effects of the trade agreements which underpin globalization. There are many more. I would suggest you also get her book Shock Doctrine. Curious actions by your government begin to make sense with this background.

Suddenly, trade law became a whole lot less abstract. And if you think that only right wing governments cow tow to their financial bosses, I have news for you. Yes the Left often puts people of integrity up for election rather than puppets but they also receive a lot of their finances from big business. PPCT

I had to copy this to my blog. It expresses so well what I have come to understand abut America. We run a small organic farm here in New Zealand and have many many WWOOF'ers passing through and working with us anywhere from a couple of weeks to as much as a year. Many of them are young people from America generally under 30. With one exception, and she wasn't a WWOOFer, all are very aware of what is going on in America and they are appalled. Perhaps there is hope. Thanks to Ann Jones for such a perceptive article. At the end of the article, I have listed a few sources of information that may interest you.

Wednesday, Jan 14, 2015 10:45 AM NZDT

“Has America gone crazy?”

It's a question that dogs me wherever I
travel abroad -- and one for which I increasingly have no easy answer

Americans who live abroad — more than six million of
us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government) —
often face hard questions about our country from people we live among.
Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that
baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the
United States. Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a
guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat
free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be
considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans
abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded
“homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world.
In
my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or
travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet. I’ve been to
both poles and a great many places in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve
talked with people all along the way. I still remember a time when to be
an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World
War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too
many reasons to go into here.
That’s changed, of course. Even
after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people — in the Middle
East, no less — willing to withhold judgment on the U.S. Many thought
that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004. His return to office truly
spelled the end of America as the world had known it. Bush had started
a war, opposed by the entire world, because he wanted to and he could. A
majority of Americans supported him. And that was when all the
uncomfortable questions really began.

In
the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway,
through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those
two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the
questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a
single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you
crazy? Please explain.
Then recently, I traveled back to the
“homeland.” It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just
how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign
observers are far better informed about us than the average American is
about them. This is partly because the “news” in the American media is
so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how
other countries think — even countries with which we were recently, are
currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s belligerence alone,
not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world
to keep close track of us. Who knows, after all, what conflict the
Americans may drag you into next, as target or reluctant ally?
So
wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants
to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another
country bombed in the name of our “national security,” another peaceful protest march attacked by our increasingly militarized police, another diatribe against
“big government” by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head
that very government in Washington. Such news leaves foreign audiences
puzzled and full of trepidation.Question Time
Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which 1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way). At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since
the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880. Some versions, as in France
and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private
systems. Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not
begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health
care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as baffling, if not frankly brutal.
In the Scandinavian countries, long considered to be the most socially advanced in the world, a national (physical
and mental) health program, funded by the state, is a big part — but
only a part — of a more general social welfare system. In Norway, where
I live, all citizens also have an equal right to education (state subsidized preschool from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty training or university education and beyond), unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave, old age pensions,
and more. These benefits are not merely an emergency “safety net”;
that is, charitable payments grudgingly bestowed upon the needy. They
are universal: equally available to all citizens as human rights
encouraging social harmony — or as our own U.S. constitution would put
it, “domestic tranquility.” It’s no wonder that, for many years,
international evaluators have ranked Norway as the best place to grow old, to be a woman, and to raise a child.
The title of “best” or “happiest” place to live on Earth comes down to a
neighborly contest among Norway and the other Nordic social
democracies, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland.
In Norway, all benefits are paid for mainly by high taxation.
Compared to the mind-numbing enigma of the U.S. tax code, Norway’s is
remarkably straightforward, taxing income from labor and pensions
progressively, so that those with higher incomes pay more. The tax
department does the calculations, sends an annual bill, and taxpayers,
though free to dispute the sum, willingly pay up, knowing what they and
their children get in return. And because government policies
effectively redistribute wealth and tend to narrow the country’s slim
income gap, most Norwegians sail pretty comfortably in the same boat.
(Think about that!)

Bloggers note: The Norwegian benefits are also paid for from a sovereign wealth fund set up using the revenue from their part of the North Sea Oil. Britian frittered her portion away on current expenses, Norway set up this fund, which, by the way, is used, amongst other things, to fund Norwegian research, in order to create revenue for her programs.

Life and Liberty
This
system didn’t just happen. It was planned. Sweden led the way in the
1930s, and all five Nordic countries pitched in during the postwar
period to develop their own variations of what came to be called the
Nordic Model: a balance of regulated capitalism, universal social
welfare, political democracy, and the highest levels of gender and
economic equality on the planet. It’s their system. They invented it.
They like it. Despite the efforts of an occasional conservative
government to muck it up, they maintain it. Why?
In all the Nordic
countries, there is broad general agreement across the political
spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met — when they can
cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their
transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their
aging parents — only then can they be free to do as they like. While the
U.S. settles for the fantasy that, from birth, every kid has an equal
shot at the American dream, Nordic social welfare systems lay the
foundations for a more authentic equality and individualism.
These
ideas are not novel. They are implied in the preamble to our own
Constitution. You know, the part about “we the People” forming “a more
perfect Union” to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings
of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Even as he prepared the
nation for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt memorably specified
components of what that general welfare should be in his State of the
Union address in 1941. Among the “simple basic things that must never be
lost sight of,” he listed“equality
of opportunity for youth and others, jobs for those who can work,
security for those who need it, the ending of special privileges for the
few, the preservation of civil liberties for all,” and oh yes, higher
taxes to pay for those things and for the cost of defensive armaments.
Knowing
that Americans used to support such ideas, a Norwegian today is
appalled to learn that a CEO of a major American corporation makes between
300 and 400 times as much as its average employee. Or that governors
Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey, having run up
their state’s debts by cutting taxes for the rich, now plan to cover the loss with
money snatched from the pension funds of workers in the public sector.
To a Norwegian, the job of government is to distribute the country’s
good fortune reasonably equally, not send it zooming upward, as in
America today, to a sticky-fingered one percent.
In their
planning, Norwegians tend to do things slowly, always thinking of the
long term, envisioning what a better life might be for their children,
their posterity. That’s why a Norwegian, or any northern European, is
aghast to learn that two-thirds of American college students finish
their education in the red, some owing $100,000 or more. Or that in the U.S., still the world’s richest country, one in three children lives in poverty, along with one in fiveyoung people between the ages of 18 and 34. Or that America’s recent multi-trillion-dollar wars were fought on a credit card to be paid off by our kids. Which brings us back to that word: brutal.
Implications
of brutality, or of a kind of uncivilized inhumanity, seem to lurk in
so many other questions foreign observers ask about America like: How
could you set up that concentration camp in Cuba, and why can’t you shut
it down? Or: How can you pretend to be a Christian country and still
carry out the death penalty? The follow-up to which often is: How could
you pick as president a man proud of executing his fellow citizens at
the fastest rate recorded in Texas history? (Europeans will not soon forget George W. Bush.)
Other things I’ve had to answer for include:
* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?
* Why can’t you understand science?
* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?
* How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
* How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?
* How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?
* Why do you Americans like guns so much? Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

To
many, the most baffling and important question of all is: Why do you
send your military all over the world to stir up more and more trouble
for all of us?
That last question is particularly pressing because
countries historically friendly to the United States, from Australia to
Finland, are struggling to keep up with an influx of refugees from
America’s wars and interventions. Throughout Western Europe and
Scandinavia, right-wing parties that have scarcely or never played a
role in government are now rising rapidly on a wave of opposition to long-established immigration policies. Only last month, such a party almost toppled the sitting social democratic government of Sweden, a generouscountry that has absorbed more than its fair share of asylum seekers fleeing the shock waves of “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”The Way We Are
Europeans
understand, as it seems Americans do not, the intimate connection
between a country’s domestic and foreign policies. They often trace
America’s reckless conduct abroad to its refusal to put its own house in
order. They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety
net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of itsorganized
labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a
standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social
inequality in almost a century.
They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and
next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and
fearful. They understand as well why so many Americans have lost trust
in a government that has done so little new for them over the past three
decades or more, except for Obama’s endlessly embattled health care effort, which seems to most Europeans a pathetically modest proposal.
What
baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling
numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support
its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich. How to
explain that? In Norway’s capital, where a statue of a contemplative
President Roosevelt overlooks the harbor, many America-watchers think he
may have been the last U.S. president who understood and could explain
to the citizenry what government might do for all of them. Struggling
Americans, having forgotten all that, take aim at unknown enemies far
away — or on the far side of their own towns.
It’s hard to know
why we are the way we are, and — believe me — even harder to explain it
to others. Crazy may be too strong a word, too broad and vague to pin
down the problem. Some people who question me say that the U.S. is
“paranoid,” “backward,” “behind the times,” “vain,” “greedy,”
“self-absorbed,” or simply “dumb.” Others, more charitably, imply that
Americans are merely “ill-informed,” “misguided,” “misled,” or “asleep,”
and could still recover sanity. But wherever I travel, the questions
follow, suggesting that the United States, if not exactly crazy, is
decidedly a danger to itself and others. It’s past time to wake up,
America, and look around. There’s another world out here, an old and
friendly one across the ocean, and it’s full of good ideas, tried and
true.

You will have heard the report yesterday by the
International Panel on Climate Change and the subsequent comments by
the head of the UN, Ban Key Moon.

In the vernacular, we are F$%#&d if we don't take immediate and drastic measures to reduce our carbon foot print.

This letter is predicated
on the hope/belief that you agree with what was said. Namely that we
must wean ourselves off fossil fuels and rather rapidly at that.

To
my mind the ideal function of government is to set the stage so that
others do the work. In addition, I believe that subsidies are very
rarely a good solution for anything. to collect money cost money. To
distribute money costs money. It is far more efficient to leave the
money in the hands of the people who will use it.

To give a
simple example. Suppose you wanted to encourage people to buy and
install solar electric systems. It would be far more efficient and
effective to wave GST on solar panels and inverters than to collect the
GST and give a subsidy to people who buy solar equipment.

I'll leave you to fill in the gaps and suss out the measures you could take to actually have an effect on our carbon foot print. Or alternately, there are a list of links at the end of this blog to troll through for ideas.

We,
in New Zealand, must not hide behind the fallacious argument that nothing we do will
make any difference. The argument given is that even if we stopped emitting any green house
gasses, this would have no effect on the worlds output of these gases.
That is completely correct but countries are even more sheep-like than individual people and follow a leader. We
have been the leader many times in the past and the rest of the world
has followed. Besides, we emit 10 times the green house gasses per
capita than the average country of the world so we should be making an
effort commensurate with a country of 43 million people.

If we do take effective measures to greatly reduce our use of fossil fuels there are a number of possibilities.

#Suppose for the sake of the argument that the conclusions of all this research into climate change are nonsense and we will have reduced our use of fossil fuels for nothing. If you believe this, have a look at the following link. There are many many positive outcomes from ceasing to use coal, oil and gas for energy completely unrelated to climate change.
http://mtkass.blogspot.co.nz/2010/10/forget-climate-change.html

There is the possibility that the climate will continue to change gradually, as it is doing now and that the climate zones will continue to creep poleward (in the northern hemisphere) at about a km per year and we might just be able to adapt to this. There is however the possibility that there will be a sudden change in the climate. The stratigraphic record shows that this has happened in the past and many scientists believe that we are pushing the climate into another sudden change. A sudden lurch poleward of climate zones would likely wipe out the seed crops (wheat, barley, corn, rape seed etc.) of the Northern Hemisphere and the result of that doesn't bear thinking about. By setting an example we might just drag the rest of the world kicking and screaming to follow our example.

# It could be that sudden climate shifts will occur but only in the Northern Hemisphere. There are some reasons, which I won't go into here that suggest that this is possible. Sure, here in New Zealand we will have some pretty radical weather. You can't shift the climate of the whole Northern Hemisphere without some effect on the southern half but there is a reasonable chance that we won't see the drastic shifts in climate zones that will occur in the North. Don't get too comfortable with the thought. We are an agricultural exporting country and our markets in the North will be trashed. At first it may be to our benefit as food prices skyrocket and we will accumulate lots of money. This is probably pie in the sky thinking. With a collapse of their economies, the money of the northern hemisphere countries will be highly unstable and likely worthless.

Add to this, billions of refugees trying to get into some relatively safe country and the belief of certain parties that we gain a benefit from rich people paying their way into New Zealand and it is not a pretty picture.

New Zealand has been the leader so many times in the past. The stakes now are so much greater than for any of the initiatives we have previously taken. Let's be the leader again and set the example.

The Cyclopedia of New Zealand [Canterbury Provincial District]

[Waipara]

Waipara is in the Waipara road district and in the Kowai
riding of the Ashley county. The township is on the banks of the Waipara
river, close to the railway traffic bridge. There is a post office at
the flag railway station, mails are received and despatched daily, and
there is telephonic connection with Amberley. The railway station is
forty-one miles from Christchurch, and stands 231 feet above the level
of the sea. Glenmark homesteud is not far away from the settlement.
There is a hotel at Waipara, and coaches ply daily between the township
and Cheviot. At the census of 1901 the population of the township was
eighteen, at Upper Waipara twenty-five, at Waipara Downs also
twenty-five, and the railway co-operative workmen numbered 163. These
men were, at the date of the census, engaged on the construction of the
Waipara-Cheviot branch railway, and were, in the majority of cases,
living in tents.

The Waipara Post Office
is conducted at the railway station. It is a
building of the usual type, and is used as a residence for the
postmistress, as well as for the purposes of the department. The
postmistress is also in charge of the goods shed Waipara is connected by
telephone with Amberley, and mails are received and despatched daily.
Mrs Georgina May, postmistress at Waipara, has been in charge since
1895.

Waipara-Cheviot Railway Line. This line was begun in 1900, and has been pushed
ahead by a large party of co-operative workmen. In July, 1902, about
twelve miles of the formation and rails had been laid down, ballasting
having been completed for ten miles; and the line was opened for traffic
as far as Scargill—about fifteen miles—on the 16th of December, 1902.

Mr. John Alexander Wilson, Resident Engineer, under the Public Works
Department, at Waipara, took charge of the work in 1902. He is referred
to at page 150 of the Wellington volume of this Cyclopedia. Since the
publication of that volume Mr. Wilson has been for three years on the
Midland railway, and was for fourteen months on the North Island trunk
line, before being transferred to Waipara.

Waipara Hotel
(William James Alpe, proprietor). This hotel,
which was established in 1883, stands at the junction of the north and
Cheviot roads, and clone to the railway station. A coach leaves the
hotel every day for Cheviot, and one also arrives daily from the same
place. The house contains eighteen rooms, including ten bedrooms, a
comfortable dining room, and suitable sitting rooms, etc. The stables
and paddocks attached to the hotel are very convenient to travellers and
drivers of stock.

Mr. William James Alpe, the Proprietor, was born in Auckland, in 1864.
When he was ten years of age he removed with his people to Christchurch,
where, after leaving school, he learned the business of a hairdresser,
tobacconist, and fishing-tackle dealer. For three years and a half he
had a business in High Street, and afterwards in Colombo Street North,
for five years, and then for six years next the Empire Hotel, in High
Street. Christchurch. In 1900, Mr. Alpe purchased the Waipara Hotel from
his predecessor, Mr. A Francis. The hotel is situated on the banks of
the Waipara river, and is forty-one miles distant from Christchurch by
rail, and thirty-seven miles by road.

Francis, A., Coach Proprietor and Farmer, Waipara. Mr. Francis
was born in Cornwall, England, in 1856, educated at the local school,
and brought up on his father's farm. He came to New Zealand in 1877, in
the ship “Northern Monarch,” and after farming in the Timaru district
for three years, entered the service of the Hon. E. Grey, and
subsequently that of Mr. Moore, of “Glenmark,” with whom he remained for
seven years. In 1892 he purchased the Waipara Hotel, but sold it in
1900 to the present proprietor, Mr. W. J. Alpe. Mr. Francis's coach runs
regularly between Waipara and Cheviot, leaving Waipara on Tuesdays,
Thursdays, and Saturdays, and Cheviot on Mondays, Wednesdays, and
Fridays. Mr. Francis was married, in 1885, to Miss Barrow, and has two
sons and three daughters.